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Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease. But one such death remain'd to come; The last poetic voice is dumb— We stand to-day by Wordsworth's tomb. When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt him like the thunder's roll. With shivering heart the strife we saw Of passion with eternal law; And yet with reverential awe We watch'd the fount of fiery life Which served for that Titanic strife. When Goethe's death was told, we said: Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head. Physician of the iron age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear; And struck his finger on the place, And said: Thou ailest here, and here! He look'd on Europe's dying hour Of fitful dream and feverish power; His eye plunged down the weltering strife, The turmoil of expiring life— He said: The end is everywhere, Art still has truth, take refuge there! And he was happy, if to know Causes of things, and far below His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness. And Wordsworth!—Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice! For never has such soothing voice Been to your shadowy world convey'd, Since erst, at morn, some wandering shade Heard the clear song of Orpheus come Through Hades, and the mournful gloom. Wordsworth has gone from us—and ye, Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen—on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. He found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round; He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sun-lit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. Our youth return'd; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, The freshness of the early world. Ah! since dark days still bring to light Man's prudence and man's fiery might, Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force; But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power? Others will teach us how to dare, And against fear our breast to steel; Others will strengthen us to bear— But who, ah! who, will make us feel? The cloud of mortal destiny, Others will front it fearlessly— But who, like him, will put it by? Keep fresh the grass upon his grave, O Rotha, with thy living wave! Sing him thy best! for few or none Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.

Stars by the power of their orbit are stars in the order of the sun. But if they are not figures of orbit, they are not in the sun. Exactly like me: by the power of my yearnings I am in the family. And if I will not yearn, I am not in the family. Memories are a house. Time is a roof. All the time a roof. All the time time. I would like sometime to die unto them and see them. Benno Rothenberg related that when he saw some archaeology, he had a feeling of homeland. As if he were in his house. I do not deny that a man who reaches a certain age can no longer hope that those from whom he came will remain still alive with him, as my mother once wrote to me in one of the letters of her twilight. From the fadings of her letters into the fatedness of man: But when can they. After all there's no chance of seeing you. And once, in a discarded and forgotten letter: "Good night, Yehiel alter lebn. Slumber has descended upon me. I am caught in the throes of sleep.Khbin shlayferig gevorn." Said in a letter that nobody reads, that nobody read. —February 8, 1989

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is a “young Republican.” I have a nine months’ daughter, young enough to be my granddaughter. Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear. These are the tranquillized Fifties, and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime? I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short enclosure like my school soccer court, and saw the Hudson River once a day through sooty clothesline entanglements and bleaching khaki tenements. Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz, a jaundice-yellow (“it’s really tan”) and fly-weight pacifist, so vegetarian, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit. He tried to convert Bioff and Brown, the Hollywood pimps, to his diet. Hairy, muscular, suburban, wearing chocolate double-breasted suits, they blew their tops and beat him black and blue. I was so out of things, I’d never heard of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird. “No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.” He taught me the “hospital tuck,” and pointed out the T-shirted back of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke, there piling towels on a rack, or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full of things forbidden the common man: a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm. Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred his concentration on the electric chair— hanging like an oasis in his air of lost connections....

Every reader loves the way he tells off the sun, shouting busy old fool into the English skies even though they were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning. And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day pacing the carpet and repeating the words, feeling the syllables lock into rows until I can stand and declare, the book held closed by my side, that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time. But after a few steps into stanza number two, wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes, I can feel the first one begin to fade like sky-written letters on a windy day. And by the time I have taken in the third, the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now, a wavering line of acrid smoke. So it’s not until I leave the house and walk three times around this hidden lake that the poem begins to show any interest in walking by my side. Then, after my circling, better than the courteous dominion of her being all states and him all princes, better than love’s power to shrink the wide world to the size of a bedchamber, and better even than the compression of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem, testing the plank of every line, it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

Memory is an old Mexican woman sweeping her yard with a broom. She has grown even smaller now, residing at that vanishing point decades after one dies, but at some times, given the right conditions— an ordinary dream, or practically anything in particular— she absolutely looms, assuming the stature she had in the neighborhood. This was the Great Valley, and we had swept in to do the grooming. We were on the move, tending what was essentially someone else's garden. Memory's yard was all that in miniature, in microcosm: rivers for irrigation, certain plants, certain trees ascertained by season. Without formal acknowledgment, she was most certainly the head of a community, American. Memory had been there forever. We settled in around her; we brought the electricity of blues and baptized gospel, ancient adaptations of icons, spices, teas, fireworks, trestles, newly acquired techniques of conflict and healing, common concepts of collective survival. . . Memory was there all the while. Her house, her shed, her skin, were all the same— weathered— and she didn't do anything, especially, except hum as she moved; Memory, in essence, was unmemorable. Yet, ask any of us who have long since left, who have all but forgotten that adulterated place paved over and parceled out by the powers that be, and what we remember, without even choosing to, is an old woman humming, sweeping, smoothing her yard: Memory.

Somewhere, someone is asking a question, and I stand squinting at the classroom with one hand cupped behind my ear, trying to figure out where that voice is coming from. I might be already an old man, attempting to recall the night his hearing got misplaced, front-row-center at a battle of the bands, where a lot of leather-clad, second-rate musicians, amped up to dinosaur proportions, test drove their equipment through our ears. Each time the drummer threw a tantrum, the guitarist whirled and sprayed us with machine-gun riffs, as if they wished that they could knock us quite literally dead. We called that fun in 1970, when we weren’t sure our lives were worth surviving. I’m here to tell you that they were, and many of us did, despite ourselves, though the road from there to here is paved with dead brain cells, parents shocked to silence, and squad cars painting the whole neighborhood the quaking tint and texture of red jelly. Friends, we should have postmarks on our foreheads to show where we have been; we should have pointed ears, or polka-dotted skin to show what we were thinking when we hot-rodded over God’s front lawn, and Death kept blinking. But here I stand, an average-looking man staring at a room where someone blond in braids with a beautiful belief in answers is still asking questions. Through the silence in my dead ear, I can almost hear the future whisper to the past: it says that this is not a test and everybody passes.

Perhaps, when we the strangers in the bar’s blue light turn liberal, you’d claim fraternity or clan and say Detroit is turned American by the community of appetite. There was this hurried time of fear of the last bell, our sure prognostication it would be somber so soon to face a sky of December that impended on the light blue snow swell, when someone turned and told of Caucasian wheat fields, the harvest sun, a last effrontery. His father decapitates their Turkish master. The village is invested. No one yields. Then, you may know, the last round came, and with it pride. I swivelled round to face my own whiskey recalling anecdotes in turn of ancestral snowfields and running wolves and fireside.

We spend our morning in the flower stalls counting the dark tongues of bells that hang from ropes waiting for the silence of an hour. We find a table, ask for paella, cold soup and wine, where a calm light trembles years behind us. In Buenos Aires only three years ago, it was the last time his hand slipped into her dress, with pearls cooling her throat and bells like these, chipping at the night— As she talks, the hollow clopping of a horse, the sound of bones touched together. The paella comes, a bed of rice and camarones, fingers and shells, the lips of those whose lips have been removed, mussels the soft blue of a leg socket. This is not paella, this is what has become of those who remained in Buenos Aires. This is the ring of a rifle report on the stones, her hand over her mouth, her husband falling against her. These are the flowers we bought this morning, the dahlias tossed on his grave and bells waiting with their tongues cut out for this particular silence.

After Hasior They fired a bullet into the head of each question, trying to kill Kant’s unending argument with Hegel. They burned laws, moral codes, & the Golden Means. Anyone serving tea & cookies to Death, looking or acting as if he knew love, stood before the firing squad. All questions had to go. Pronoun or noun. If it crawled on busted kneecaps, whimpering & begging for mercy, it was still half of a question. *     *     * The little skyscraper of glass boxes sunlight strikes the same time of day at a certain angle outside Zakopane looks like condos where nimble ghosts still stand up to the darkest answers. No, I can’t hear one voice pleading. But I do hear gusts coming down from the hills. No, you’re wrong again. The crow perched on the totem is real. Look at how the light lifts off its wings, but I wish I could understand what it is he’s trying to say. I think I heard a name.

september is a month like any other and unlike any other. it seems in september everything awaited will arrive: in the calm air, in a particular scent, in the stillness of the quay. when september comes, i know i’m going to lose myself. the ants climbing my legs and a certain change of light tell me so. the air comes and goes beneath my dress, pressing the warm cloth against me, pressing me with the desire to find myself in the sea, that sea beaten deep gray and magnetized by neutrinos, thanks to which i can perform my observations and telekinetic communications. the salty, sticky wall of the Malecón is covered with fish and forgotten hooks. i like to lick its sheen of salt and make my tongue salty and sticky. in that moment the rest of the city can vanish, it’s just that sea and me, before all thought, all desire. then i undress and enter, knowing i’ll find something, and that the boats—which seem suspended on the horizon, seem to have slipped their limits, motionless and painted there—are also mine...when i met you and you met me it was still september and we were strange and different and would be for a long time after—though i sometimes snagged you with certain secret hooks, shaping a sort of formless impression: something strange and indefinable divided the outline of your body from the space around you, but without making a human form, and in your eyes the sunlight revolved like a bicycle’s spoked wheel...the bicycle moves on and i’m carried along, filled with dry branches and coral. in my hair i wear the butterflies we collected together. the little house, one point amid the infinite, comes into view: already we can see the windows, like little black voids, and their curtains beating in the wind. i squeeze your waist, the bicycle moves on; even though the street is narrow the bicycle rolls on, rolls on against the spray. when you turn your head and see my hand, my hook snagged in a struggle of desire, the sun has turned immense in your eyes again. you make for the little house already in view, already at the edge of the curve...a naked man in lamplight is a magnificent animal: his pointy shoulders jut out and cut off the light. a line of fuzz descends from his navel to where the darkness begins, where the skin tightens like the skin of a fig. his body—your body—is an arc i want to tighten, to overcome, to conquer. hidden behind a tree, i can see your eyes again. the Mississippi is a big river with many tributaries. the arc tightens and closes. i throw an arm over you, a leg, a hand, a lip, hallucinations, an ear—as usual. my body moves on. the Mississippi is a big river with many tributaries. its water burns in my thighs, in the course of my dreams: the Mississippi is a deep and torrential river situated in the United States, it is born in Lake Itasca, passes through St. Paul, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, traverses 3,780 kilometers and slides and slides through a wide delta to the Gulf of Mexico. i’m in geography class. i like this class. the world just barely fits in my head. the map hangs before me with its spokes and points. someone made that all up, just to make me think i belong to one of those zones out there. all those castles and fortifications to toy with, the beginnings of everything that seems to be reality, but isn’t, because we’re not outside but inside the globe, that huge globe so stubborn in its sufficiency, and even far from the classroom nothing’s different: there’s just the idea of that transparent globe that is my image of the world, always turning, imperfect and constant inside me. i like the maps and the instability of the geography that situates places in my head. i like using graph paper to plot the latitudes and longitudes i can’t measure. i also like the geography professor, whose eyes i must constantly avoid in order not to drown myself. he doesn’t know, he can’t imagine, that while he lectures, while he looks at me, i draw fish in my notebook to throw in his river. the boy behind me won’t stop looking at me, and whatever one does the others all follow, watching from the corners of their eyes. that’s why i’m going to fold the page away from his gaze and make a true map where he won’t find me, alone at my desk in the middle of the world...in the middle of the lake there’s a boat and we’re three—although the third may have already vanished for us—and i want to paddle and sit in the center. you’ve taken off your shirt: the landscape appears and disappears. when i take the oars you want to teach me how to row over the edge. you try to teach me: you take my hands—you’re behind and above me. my fingers are lost in the middle of the boat. i’m wearing faded jeans and carrying a purple parasol. the oar descends toward the deep and tangles with seaweed. my hair hangs surly and limp on my wet shoulders. we try to steer but go nowhere. you explain the roundness of the earth; the sharpened tip of the compass needle, always precise, marking contours, lines, limits. the shadow and truth of your body in the landscape: appearances and disappearances when you try to comprehend the possible across great distances, the symmetry, forgetfulness, incarnation in other beings: animals, plants, and later, men once again. you taught me all this, but i’m not a map and i hold still. i abandon my shoes and my dread of nearing the end: the oar descends toward the deep, it is september. we don’t move. i keep still to be different, that’s why...